♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> next on book tv nobel prize-winning economist richard thaler looks at ways decisions have been made during the covid-19 pandemic. then april falcon dos discusses the use of digital data and offers her thoughts on how to manage privacy. and later financial analyst steve socha explains why he believes corporate america has been changed in recent years by progressive ideology. and more schedule information of booktv.org.

here is richard thaler. back welcome to today's talk symposium. the keynote speaker the professor richard thaler. i'm in report of economic support at the "new york times" and i will be providing over today's discussion. this symposium is presented by the marie's are greenberg center for geo- economic studies. and is made possible the general support of robert d mitchell. now i do not think i need to introduce professor thaler two. i will know in there as most of you probably know that he won the nobel prize for economics. he is the author of the very, very popular book, nudge about how to nudge people's behavior in a way that we might want for policy regions.

hi professor thaler freedom really happier here with this. >> thanks happy to see you. sort of. [laughter] >> host: sort of. let the >> we are trying to get her heads around is how we are dealing with this pandemic. what things we do better, what have we done well? where we fallen a bit short. i want to start, my question she was thinking about vaccines. at the vaccination process of the united states. i think it's in the front of everybody's minds. the thought out there is could be doing this fact or? it seems like the supply constraints is easing. but there still seems to be a bunch of distribution involvement. now you have written really famously about nudges how to make it easy for people to do what we want them to do. but i understand the latest

edition of your book, "nudge", which is coming out shortly with cass sunstein you read about sludge which is kind of the opposite. it's in many ways we can gum up the works. so thinking of nudges in sludge i would love to hear insights about how we are going about this process the vaccination, navigating the trade-off between equity and speed and maybe share some ideas about how we might do this better. >> thanks. it is certainly the case the initial rollout has had lots of bottlenecks. i think in many cases we made it harder on ourselves, i'm sorry the government has made it harder on them selves in this case the state governments by setting up all kinds of criteria. that makes the interfaces that

you have to log onto more complicated. it makes the check ins more complicated if they are bothering to check which the impression i have is that they are not. and we have lots of variations across states and within states and within cities. a friend of mine manderson chicago told me he got an appointment in a western suburb. it is known as a outlier republican leaning town in the western suburbs. i don't know if that reflects the political antipathy to the vaccine in some segments. but i think we certainly could have done this a better.

all signs are it is ramping up. i proposed in our favorite newspaper a few months ago that we consider possibly radical suggestion of taking a small number of doses and auctioning them off. and using the proceeds for some good cause there are so many good causes there would be no shortage. i did not think there is any chance this idea would be adopted. but my argument was, we know that the rich and famous are going to work the system, why not at least get some money from them. my vague impression is that

the first part of that premise has more or less played out. it is like everything in the world the smart and educated and wealthy know how to work the system. so that works to their advantage. where we are going now the main "nudge" i would like is, i would like us to create some kind of electronic covid passport to certify you are vaccinated. getting a high tech which is a peace of paper that might get

you somewhere seems trivially easy to afford think all you need is a xerox machine so i would like something on your phone that shows your photo id and some qr code that indicates you have been vaccinated. as soon everyone who wants to be vaccinated has, then start using that for admission to things like sporting events, bars, and anyone who wants to use that as a criteria for getting in. that is my "nudge".

spirit presumably that would help with taking incentive for people to get vaccinated and a first place, right? select exactly. the people who do not want to be vaccinated, do want to go to bars and baseball games. so if they have to sacrifice and get a shot in the arm to do it they want to do, let's help with that. >> i think of one wonders of this can overcome the reluctance to have big government know stuff about this for this privacy concern about government intrusion and knowing about us with creditor cummings knowing about us think americans are oddly paranoid if you have a smart phone someone knows where you are all the time we all wonder

about how the smart speaker is listening to our conversations. but they certainly know where you are. there vincent interesting academic papers written in the past year or so. because the company that owned this data have been giving than two academics to play with. mostly to track covid kinds of issues. some very amusing finding which is that thanksgiving dinners were family members came from red and blue districts for dinner were dinners lasted 45 minutes less anyway, i've a friend in

israel did it in record speed small number of payers your healthcare provider got in touch with you i don't know i would have a national id kind the card. i would be happy to have one set of a passport and a drivers license. anyway these are the times where just a mentioning about privacy. the times when a story, within

the last year i'm thinking we actually track were president trump had been retracted bunch of congressional leaders to a scary level of precision here. that would remind people about the power of the data right? i was interested in hearing what kind of feedback did you get from your op-ed suggesting sell some doses to the rich. it strikes me on the one hand as extremely rational because we can get something out of it. i could see help lots of people would not really like that. >> i did not get as much pushback as i expected. him maybe it is because it is such a ridiculous idea that is not even worth objecting to. so yeah.

by the way, i think overcoming this last problem of the various groups that are hesitant, i do think there will be an important role for celebrities and catering to the groups that follow them. that was one of the things i thought might happen if lebron gets his shot publicly. and hands over ten grand for the privilege that bites start a movement. were not going to do that but we had for of the five most recent presidents do that add

where they all got vaccines. that is the sort of thing we have not needed that much now because we are pretty much at capacity. but i think within a month, fingers crossed, we will be at the stage where we are trying to get people to come. and so give them a ^-caret like my passport and give them role models. and in the end make it easy. go to the neighborhoods. don't need appointments, show up. >> yes. it's really interesting i read somewhere about people exhorting president trump to actually do this, take the vaccine and make it very public. apparently the groove the racial and political group

that's most reluctant to take vaccines are republican voters white republican voters i think are the most skeptical about vaccinations. >> white republican mail voters. so that would help right? >> that would help. and again i'm sure we could find people other than president trump who that group admire. maybe nascar drivers or, i don't know. fox news broadcasters. anyway. to endorse the products for sure. bit out of the vaccine and looking back over this past

year. i would really appreciate your thoughts on how we handle this public health crisis. managing behavior has been so important here. to things like social distancing and getting people to wear masks, and not coughing on their neighbors or whoever comes in terms of food. what is their assessment of how tools you can use better are fill the void? >> well, i think it is very easy to second-guess the first few months. i think i'm willing to give us all a pass on that. we did not know everything about it. i think we have at home a lifetime supply of sanitary wipes.

turned out to not be all that important. and certainly mask wearing early would've helped. role models would have helped. the biggest policy mistake i would say from the administration other than the denial was, they were good on vaccine development. though how much effect they had on that i do not know because we know pfizer and maternal exactly the right science available. and that was lucky. it was possible that we could beat where we are now with no vaccines. remember there is no hiv vaccine. and the flu vaccines are 40%

effective, something like that. it is a miracle with got these great vaccines. and the government helped some on that. but it does not seemed like they were thinking the next step ahead. which is okay, once we have them however going to get them into arms? i think a more generally you know i saw somewhere on the internet somebody posted an op-ed senator obama had written about planning for the next pandemic. and we know that the obama administration left the briefing book, here's something you guys need to be

worried about. is not like they knew anything at the time except that this could happen. you know my friend danny has a phrase he likes he calls it a pre-more time. he borrowed it from a friend of his. we are all stealing from each other. the idea is we are all good at postmortems. when the dinner gets burned my wife and i are equally good at blaming the other for forgetting to take it out of the oven. pre-boredom's are you sit down and think about what is the worst thing that could happen? and how can we plan to deal with it? someone was suggesting, in the

case that all the sudden you lose connection, get on yourself on and call. i said no, you have my cell phone number. if that happens you call me. that will be faster than me finding the place on my computer where the alternative call in numbers. we can all do better at anticipating things that can go wrong. and then preparing for them. we did not do that and i hope that a year from now, fingers crossed, we are more or less it done with this. that we won't stop thinking about the next pandemic because it won't be like this one. will have to solve different problems. and what steps should we be taking now to take the proper

precautions. nobody ever wants to do that because it seems like you are spending money for something that probably won't happen. but it might happen. that is the job of leaders. public and private sector. every firm has to be thinking about what kind of catastrophe could follow us? netflix offered to sell themselves to blockbuster for i think $50 million. blockbusters said no. this one blockbuster store left. there's lots of these stories. kodak invented digital

photography. you have to think about okay, film is really cool but what if this other thing works? maybe we should hedge. offered itself to the "new york times" back in 2003 or so. and we said no. >> i think you are in good company. [laughter] back so yes. the google boys how to do it themselves. right i hope so too. you were laying this out, i was wondering kind of a wishy-washy question here. but in some way it seems like the policy response was excellent. work speed suffered vaccine seem to been a really good

exercise in incentive design for pharma companies. you could argue lady carries act in the spring of last year did a really really good job at preventing a spike in poverty and ensuring that median income hang in there despite this. and in other respects it seems like it was a disaster. all this other may be softer signaling about how to respond to the pandemic. i wonder assist maybe just random? you get some right you get some wrong. or is there some systematic way of looking at this what you can get right and what you can get wrong. it's not like the is an obvious thing on that scale. that was in fdr's day. >> there was a bill in 2008 -- 2009 not as comprehensive.

yes the response was unprecedented. you can certainly quibble about lots of aspects of it. over talk about before, what was at the ppp that was going to small businesses, that had bankers and they were able to get right to the head of the line. and i think my mantra the "nudge" mantras make it easy. so one of the things that handicaps the government, is

they have an unbelievably archaic information technologies. and so if you think about all of these passing about what income can make you payable for what payments, where the basin that on? is it a 2020 income or 2019 income? 2019 is the last tax return they have unless you have five early. so this screws us up all kinds of economic situations. we do not know who is unemployed unless they go through a lot of sludge.

we see people standing in line at some unemployment office. now in principle, the employer's filing, pay social security every pay period. the government could now in real time when you stop getting a paycheck. it goes back to the privacy thing. here it privacy ancient computer systems. but obamacare daca has problems because of this. even the fact you paula apply in november biden offered a new sign-up in february i think february through april

would be much better if the whole obamacare sign-up occurred after taxes had been filed. right now you sign based on ancient income. then you get settled up a gear and a half when you file your taxes. this is a crazy system. the people who are most in need of health insurance are people who are in and out of the markets. so the strongest argument for having, does not have to be single-payer but having a public option that would work best if you were automatically enrolled in that every time you lost your job. now you have these cobra things. if you decide to switch and go to work for the wall street

journal, you will switch -- suppose you decided to become a freelancer. oh my god what am i going to do about my health insurance? all of these people who lost their jobs who were gig workers and everything, we just need to make the whole system function better and get rid of the sledge. >> interestingly, as i hear you i think that a lot of these things might be politically complicated because it setting all these defaults in a way that are more effective might also be portrayed as a loss of individual freedoms. i wonder if you have encountered that with the arguments for nudges? it is almost always the misguided critique. libertarian paternalism.

a phrase that was intended to antagonize everyone. which is a strategy that is served me well as an academic. but probably that was not chosen to win friends. but, every policy we advocate has opt out. so if there is an option to be automatically enrolled in the public health insurance and the day you lose your health insurance from your employer and you don't want that, fine. isn't that better than having to fill out 50 forms? and why is that when i got my

back seat i had to fill out a bunch of forms? it is crazy that they do not have this basic information. i get a flu shot every year, why should they be relying on my memory as to whether or not i had an adverse reaction? it ought to be in the system. but healthcare records were the most paranoid about that. not imposes costs. >> yes for sure, for sure. i'm about to open this up to questions from the public. but excuse me some members. just want to ask you before we go, because i just learned or recently learned that you did your phd on techniques to put a dollar value on life. i find that fascinating corner of economics. found really uncomfortable

that'll make a really big different for policies whether it's one fights for their lives or years of light might change, strategies for vaccines or anything else. i was wondering if you thought this kind of thinking, this idea putting a monetary value on life would help us think through some of the trade-offs that we have. and you better policy? : : : got to go at the head of the line, but you can imagine there's a tradeoff between how many lives you save and how many years you save.

now, it turned out in this case, the old people were so much more subject to getting this disease that going to them first and obviously in hindsight should have been spending a lot more care and nursing homes, but generally -- the idea that you can't put a value on a human life is wrong because we do it every day, and we've all been making decisions about how much social interaction we take, and that's putting a value.

how much time should i be spending with my grandchildren? we make these tradeoffs all the time, whether we like -- we don't like thinking about it. i remember once having a conversation with my co-author back when we were college at the university of chicago, and i asked him, how much more he had demand from the university of chicago to compensate him for the slightly higher risk his teenaged daughter was bearing because she was living in hyde park as opposed to ithaca if he had taken a job at cornell, where i had formerly taught. and he just got mad at me for even asking him that question. >> here i remember in the whole

debate over let's open the economy because the closed economy imposes costs. there's an enormous cost in lives and health from allowing everybody out on the street. so that tradeoff was really there but it seemed like nobody was kind of like trying to look at it in an analytical kind of quantitative view. >> the don't because it would be politically unpopular to say it out loud. you not allowed to say these things unless you're just an academic like me and it doesn't matter if you make people mad. >> so, i would like to open the floor for members to ask questions. it's just to remind you this is on the record which means at some point what you say is going

surface on the internet somehow. the operator, laura, will remind you how to join the question queue but if you will, please go ahead. >> we'll take the first question from. >> , two questions if i may. we as a sew e society have not done good with planning future epidemics. what would it take do overcome that and you mosted passports about vaccines which makes sense but vaccines may not work against variants that may occur, mutations, only 95%. johnson & johnson case it's only 85% effective. will that lead to sort of a false sense of security if we have such passports? and thank you. >> sure thing. so, first of all, in our book we have a foot note, very important

footnote, where we quote william sapphire on the correct pronunciation on the title of our book, which is nudge, which rhymes with judge, not to be confused with "noog now a nudge is a gentle push in a helpful direct and a nudge is somebody who does that a bit too often. that said, how can we encourage this kind of planning? it's difficult, and as i was saying even to n in the priority sector where there's billions of dollars at stake we don't see enough of it, and i think it has to be a discipline and it's -- in be private sector it's the job of top management to be the

worryer in chief and companies i've been involved in as either my own little company or companies i've advised, i always use this premortem idea, let's set aside some time to worry about what is the worst that can happen? and then how can we prevent it? to in the government i don't have a quick way of doing that because there's no reward for it, but certainly the people in the current administration that i know i'll be nudging them to do more of that. you know, as to whether the passports would encourage more risk taking behavior, i think there's a danger in -- david lee

in his daily newsletter brought this up recently. i think there's a danger in people doing too much scaremongering. and, yes, it's possible that as somebody who has been vaccinated twice that i'm still carrying or that there will be some variant that it won't work for, but we went about our business when there was flu, and if the risks are back down to levels of flu, then that is the way we ought to be behaving, and i don't think we're going to have to masks for the rest of our -- wear masks

for the rest of our lives. when should we make the switch over? i'll let tony fouch decide on that but i don't think we should -- i don't think we should overreact and i think we want to give people a light at the end of the tunnel and a reward for getting vaccinated and then behave sensibly. >> laura, the next question. >> we'll take the next question from christopher graves. >> hi there, professor thaller, i'm chris graves with the ogle by center for behavioral science, and my colleague laurie sutherland in the u.k. quick question but mortality salients. friar the -- prior to the pandemic when an entire pop population threatened begins to act as a kind of caricature of the prior world view defense

prior self. they become more extreme nationalists if they were slightly nationalistic, for example, and so you become less tolerant of outgroups, but a weird thing apparently happens as well which is a kind of binge spending as you begin to come out of it to offset that doom. and i just wonder if you're tracking this in this pandemic and any effects of mortality salient? >> well, i don't know whether -- there's certainly a lot of weird behavior going but i don't know to what extent we can attribute any specific thing to this cause. there's certainly a lot of weird behavior going on in the stock market. and financial markets more generally. these meme stocks and the rise of bitcoin and -- i don't know

of any financial economist who thinks they understand what is going on, and there's these new nfts that are completely bizarre. so, i think what is true is, it's well-documented that there's been a big increase in personal investing in individual securities. and that had been very popular in the late 1990s during the tech bubble, and then it kind of had gone away, not completely but had gotten much less popular, and now there's been a resurgence. my own explanation of that was people were bored, especially in april, may, you'd run out of things to binge on streaming and there was no sporting events to

bet on, and people who maintained their jobs, had more money than ever. living at home is pretty cheap. so, you can't go out to eat and -- anyway, no way to spend any money, so one of the cool things about this pandemic has been that it's really hammered the bottom quarter, and the top three-quarters, the biggest problem has been boredom and parents are getting hammered. so, anybody with small children is getting hammered, but they may -- everyone else has more money than they used to and they started investing it in a kind of very risk-taking array, and

some of them made a lot of money. the market for the past year -- i mean we had the sharp downturn the first couple of months and then it's just been going up and up and in a market like think it's very easy to convince yourself you're a brilliant investor. and come and tell me about how good at investor you are after the market has gone back down, and it will go down at some point. i assure you. i have no idea when. i can't predict these things. so, there's lots of mysteries and -- but whether it has anything to do with being afraid you're going to die, i don't know. >> to the point of being spending, i read estimates of enormous amount of excess savings relative to trend lines

can like $2 trillion worth, and enormous pentup demand to spend on service wiz haven't been spending on. i think kind of like a big uptick in consumer demand is expected on the cards as soon as we kind of like get vaccinated and get this behind us. but i'm not sure it would be associated with fear of dying and more like, well, this kind of like, financial equilibrium that is worked out. >> whatever your favorite form of travel is, book early. >> yeah. so, thank you. laura could we have the next question, please. >> as a reminder to ask a question, please click on the raised hand icon. the next question from stanley black. >> yes, this is stanley black at the university of north carolina in chapel hill. we have seemed to as a society most of us, anyway -- accepted

that we need to protect all of us for us to be safe. in other words we need to get everybody vaccinated, we need to wear masks and so forth. however, we don't seem to have extended this internationally and it's still true there. could you comment on the fact that we're now hoarding the astrazeneca vaccine and refuse doing export it to countries that need it? >> well, there is a general problem about vaccines, something that i've been thinking about for years, and we have the following dilemma. the vaccines are worth trillions of dollars to us. but we don't think that drug companies should be making trillions of dollars from selling them. and we, meaning society, if the

drug companies were charging a thousand dollars per vaccine, there would be hell to pay. and several drug companies ceos have told me that they don't expect to make a lot of money from this directly. the best case scenario is that they get -- cut some slack from regulators down the road. now, the question of whether we're hoarding the vaccines, i can understand why president biden feels like he doesn't want to be sending vaccines around

the world while there's people clamoring to get shots, but i am confident that the u.s. will do its share in paying for vaccines, and so i think that inequality will be -- that the rich countries will go first but i -- maybe i'm overly optimistic, but i'm pretty confident that the world will be supplied with vaccines fairly expeditiously and inexpensively and we have been kind of lucky that africa has mysteriously not been hit very hard. so, we may get cut some slack on

that front but i think every country will be able to get vaccine cheaply and if they need it, will get it for essentially free. think that's going to happen, and -- india is where they are the low cost manufacturer of drugs. so, i'm not so worried about that. >> on this point i have the question of whether adding manufacturing capacity might turn out to be the next chunk of manufacturing capacity that we need to supply the world is going to be perhaps more expensive than the first bit of manufacturing capacity that we put in place because it was maybe there are making other vaccines so this is not an argument for increasing their per-unit payment we promised pharma companies because

they're -- even though main their risk lowered because they have a guaranteed market there is an an additional cost to bringing new kind of production capacity on. >> again i don't know what the constraint is. we're starting to produce vaccines pretty rapidly. i think if we're -- let's look forward a little. the problem that i referred to earlier, let's suppose that the next pandemic is more like ebola. so -- or aids. so, not affecting everybody but disproportionately affecting some people. there's not -- the solution that

michael kremer, the nobel prize winner in economics year and a half ago -- he has advocated for years something i've also advocated, which is creating prizes for discovering cures or vaccines for diseases that affect a small number of people because there's no money in it. and bill gates has been involved in this, and if it affects a small enough people, then somebody like gates may have enough money to do it himself but if we have to vaccinate a billion people, then even bill

gates can't afford that, and we do need -- we need to fund the w.h.o. and we need them to be a well-functioning organization, and i would like to see a prize for -- and a formula going back to the value of a life question, that -- so i don't know how much money pfizer and moderna are going to make from these great vaccines they create. they certainly will make in some money but they deserve more. >> yes, i'm sure that's right. thank you. and laura, could you please ask the next question. >> we'll take the next question from peter. >> hi, i'm peter of u.k. san diego. thank you for this. can you talk more about that stockpiling? how can we think about what items we need stockpile on? we're talking about overseas

production. where is the much less than not have enough that are stockpiled. how do we think about it? what do we need a theory of stockpiling? how do we decide what items to be stockpiled and how much we need of them? >> i don't know. this is a sort of medical science plus logistics question. >> i don't think about money. how do deraise the money, decide how much money we need? used that earlier as a problem of politicians and i wonder if economics can help give us ideas how to justify it and it's it's not so much asking the scientist how much we need. how to we develop the -- how do you justify investing the money because it's a risk situation you'll never know, how do you justify it? >> i -- so i think, again, i tend to be optimistic and my

wife says foolish. so, -- but i think that you can develop the sensitivity for that. i don't think it's trivial to know what it is we should be stockpiling. so, certainly ppe for the health-care workers, it was criminal that something that is as low cost to make as masks, the fact that we didn't have enough of those is crazy. part of this sludge involved in that as well, eduardo, because you -- in many cases you need to -- there are regulations to

sell a certain kind of mask, and it has to be made in a certain kind of way, and there was all kinds of sludge early on about who was allowed to do what kinds of medical tasks. so, a huge part of the medical profession was shut down because there were no hospital beds, and nobody wanted to go to the hospital for elective surgery. so all these doctors that could be trained to do whatever needed to be done, and it's only recently that dentists have been approved to administer vaccines. now, dentists give shots every day. they know how to do it. so, there are all these

regulatory features about who can do what and it varies from state to state. i have a friend here who has an md but he doesn't have a local license to practice medicine. and there are thousands of people like that in every city in the country, and we could have used their help and just -- was an ininsurmountable amount of sludge to volunteer to give your services. >> thank you. laura could we have the next question, please. >> take the next question from angelo.

mr. angelo, please accept the unmute now prompt. looks like we're have something difficulty with that like. we are'll take the next question from mark findly. >> mark findley from rice university baker institute for public policy. thank you for a great conversation today. professor thaller, as -- thaler as someone who has written a book on getting people change behaviors i'd be curious what behaviors have you observed from people that you think are likely to stick going forward and which ones will prove transient. working from home, people move ought into suburbs, et cetera. if not how should i think about what is like lick to stick and what is not. >> i mean, so, i don't know and

i'm not a fortune teller. the interest question is -- the interesting question is what is going to happen to travel. i divide my time between chicago and berkeley, and i have behavioral economists friend in both places, and back in august, i got the idea, why don't we create a new behavior economics workshop series that is berkeley,-chicago because it's virtual. right? doesn't matter where any of us are, and it's been great. i was -- we had one this morning, and now it is not quite the same as somebody coming and spending a day at your home

institution, and going out for dinner, and so forth and so on. on the other hand, it's so easy to do. no one has turned us down. can you spare an hour and 15 minutes? the same is true of this conversation. if somebody had said, can you come to washington to give a talk, we would have had to find a date that works for everybody, and if it's part of the year i'm on the west coast, that's a long flight. so, how much of the kind of things we used to travel to do will we still do that way? i don't know. certainly less. how much will people be going to work? n the office? certainly less.

much -- eduardo, much of what you do, you can do just as well, maybe even better, in your home study. now, at the university level, something that i cherish at the university of chicago is there's a very strong culture that people come to the office, and in fact when we were building a new building for the business school, the thing i lobbied for the most was underground parking garage. because in the winter in chicago, if you can avoid a 200-meter hike in the snow and then going back and scraping your car off, so anyway, you go

to the office and everyone is there, and people show up at the workshops and they go to lunch and argue all the time. and it's the most intense intellectual environment i've ever been in. for better or for worse. i would hate to lose that. so, and will these -- will the american economic association meeting ever be in person again? i don't know. hope so. on the other hand, i don't know whether you -- you have surely gone to some of those. the first weekend in january, and in god awful places, and if i never have to go to one of those again, it won't be the end of the world for me. >> yeah, the choice is always die spend the last week of

christmas vacation at the beach oar the aea meeting? >> yeah, yeah. i'll meet you at the beach. >> so listen, professor thaller, thank you so much. this was really brillianted, very interesting. i'm very grateful you spent this time for us. ♪♪ ♪♪ >> i'm lindsay goran, fellow for emerging technologies at the alliance for securing democracy and i have the pleasure to be

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